The Data Analysts Toolkit Day 5: How do R and Power BI fit together?

Technically, it is about munging data around between R and Excel and the Power BI components.

You can use RODBC to connect to data between R and SQL Server, or R and Excel. Alternatively you can import data in.

Why else might you use R?

Pivot Tables are not always enough

Scaling Data (ScaleR)

R is very good at static data visualisation but Power BI and Excel are very good at dynamic data visualisation

You want to double check your results or do further analysis

They complement one another; they do not replace one another.

You may have heard my story about one organisation calculating the median incorrectly.

The truth is, people don’t often check their data. I help design data warehouses all the time, and I don’t always hear people talk about reconciliation. I do hear about people racking up SSAS and diving straight in.

Just because something works technically, does not mean it is correct.